What is the Longest Disambiguation Page on Wikipedia? | Hacker News Reader

What is the Longest Disambiguation Page on Wikipedia?

toddwschneider.com

97 pointslil_tee18 comments

I'm not sure "List of greatest hits albums" counts as a disambiguation page. If you're going to include lists, there are plenty that have more than 415 links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supre...

True. Here's the actual Greatest Hits disambiguation page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Hits_(disambiguation)

If there was an entry for "List of lists of lists that don't contain themselves," would that page contain itself?

I think you answered your own question.

TIL: Iranian founders of towns and villages play it safe with their choice of names.

So naively translated, 'abad' more or less means 'living place', so village or town. The other parts of the names are related to key Muslim figures and have meanings like 'elevated' or 'good' (I'm not sure if they had those meanings or took on those meanings).

Other countries like to get in on the 'nice place' namings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._pl...

(Several dozen post offices are located in a Greenville)

And Ali is the founder of Shia Islam, so basically this is kind of like naming your town/parish St. Mary or something.

It's not _that_ safe though. Try calling an ambulance during a stress situation.

Not sure I trust some of those entries. These two, for example example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasanabad,_Kerman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasanabad,_Golbaf

Are very close together and one has population 95, the other an unspecified population.

Could it be possible they're the same place, just not well documented?

A little bit of explanation: <name>abad could be loosely translated as "a place founded by <name>". Abad is a popular suffix which makes place names from people's names. Ali, Mohammad, Hasan and Hoseyn are the most popular male first names in Iran. To put it in perspective, out of a population of ~76 million people (so ~38 million men), there are ~2.3 million people named Ali. It is not a new phenomenon, people have been playing it safe with their children's names for centuries. As a result, a lot of founders of towns and villages were named Ali or Mohammad. Having so many Aliabads and Mohammadabads is only a natural result.

An English equivalent might be Jamestown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown

First paragraph, this made me laugh - "what if you just want to know the real deal about the English explorer John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas?" - then you shouldn't be looking on Wikipedia!

What's the deal with the link in the second paragraph that leads to the same article, on another website with a different design? And a few more links too.

I don't understand the point.

It's a rap genius annotation. If you click it with javascript enabled, an annotation will pop up on the right hand side. Looks like on the main site it's designed to degrade gracefully so it just navigates back to the article itself, but on the hosted site the urls aren't re-written correctly.

If you've having a child and have a common surname, might be interesting to use these to find an answer the question "who is your child named after?"

I feel the need to send an interview request to john.smith@gmail.com

best part of that google spreadsheet was the chat. You meet the coolest people there.

There are 299 places in Iran named "Mohammadabad".

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